The Psychology of Intelligence

Sharing my learnings from the book, The Psychology of Intelligence by Jean Piaget

The Psychology of Intelligence by Jean Piaget

Think of developmental psychology, and the name of Jean Piaget immediately springs to mind. His theory of learning lies at the very heart of the modern understanding of the human learning process, and he is celebrated as the founding father of child psychology. A prolific writer, is the author of more than fifty books and several hundred articles. The Psychology of Intelligence is one of his most important works. Containing a complete synthesis of his thoughts on the mechanisms of intellectual development, it is an extraordinary volume by an extraordinary writer. Given his significance, it is hardly surprising that Psychology Today pronounced Piaget the Best Psychologist of the twentieth century.

• Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget first entered the field of child psychology in the 1920s. He noticed that children of similar ages, tended to make the same mistakes. What they got wrong didn’t shed much light on intelligence. How they made mistakes, on the other hand, did.
• what is intelligence? Children who performed Piaget’s cognitive tests didn’t appear to be accessing objective reality & copying information from it – they were actively constructing knowledge. Toddlers, he observed, poke, prod and pull at everything around them. Later on, children perform mental actions that have the same purpose: they rotate objects, put things in order and compare different classes of things in their minds. These actions, he came to believe, define intelligence.
• while Piaget eventually became a renowned psychologist, as a young man in the early 20th century, his great love was biology. Adaptation, therefore, played a key role in Piaget’s view of the world. If you want to understand the relationship between any living organism & its environment, he argued, look at how it adapts
  • Accommodation- a type of adaptation in which an organism changes its structure in response to an interaction with its environment
  • assimilation – incorporates a part of the external world into ourselves
• accommodation & assimilation don’t just govern our physical interactions with the environment. They also shape our psychological or cognitive relationship with the world
• adaptation is both physiological and cognitive. Our bodies and minds may be different, but they are engaged in the same task. The body has biological structures like the stomach; our minds have mental structures. Both regulate our interaction with the environment
• Schemata – a plural of schema, a plan or blueprint – are organized units of knowledge about the world or how to behave in it. These are stored in a kind of cognitive filing cabinet. When we interact with our environment, we consult this cabinet to see if there’s anything in there that can help us make sense of what’s in front of us
• assimilation occurs when an organism imposes its own structure on the environment. Assimilation is a quantitative process. As we assimilate more and more stimuli, our schemata cover more and more of our environment, thus allowing us to respond appropriately in an ever-larger number of situations. This is one driver of cognitive development
• cognitive accommodation is similarly qualitative in nature. Sometimes new stimuli don’t fit our existing schemata. This is another driver of cognitive development. There are two ways of accommodating new stimuli
  • create new schemata – pets & wild animals
  • modify existing schemata
• there are 2 ways in which we respond to our environments.
  • act directed outwards toward the worls
  • act internalized as a thought
• These acts are responses to needs. The feeling that is missing determines the goal of behavior. This is the 1st kind of act. The 2nd kind of act is where cognition enters the picture. Cognition structures or guides this behavior – by providing schema to locate the missing item. Both acts have the same goal: to create a state of balance or equilibrium between the individual & her environment
• equilibrium is a state of harmonious balance between the individual & her environment. In this state, she can assimilate the stimuli she encounters into the existing schemata
• disequilibrium occurs when schemata cannot assimilate the stimuli contained in a person’s environment. This is a frustrating & disorienting state. The individual’s mental map no longer charts the world around her. Something is missing
• the drive to restore equilibrium is called equilibration. When assimilation fails, the individual must accommodate. In children, genuine intellectual breakthroughs are the fruit of accommodations
• According to Piaget, infants lack a concept of the object, meaning that they do not understand that objects exist independently of actions such as looking, touching & sucking. The acquisition of this concept is, for him, the most important breakthrough of the sensorimotor stage of development
• Piaget’s research led him to believe that infants develop this independent object concept at around 8 months – a 1st leap toward the decentered reason that defines adult intelligence
• during the 2nd stage of development, which lasts from ages of roughly 2-7, children possess a concept of the object and begin exploring the relationships between things in their environment. This exploration, however, is preoperational – the term Piaget used for this stage. While children do attempt to analyze how objects or ideas fit together, they approach this task intuitively and don’t yet display an ability to combine, separate, compare or transform ideas logically. For preoperational children, time is subjective. The idea that the same concept applies to different objects traveling in different directions, or at different speeds, is an alien as the concept of outside perspectives
• the 3rd stage of cognitive development is a milestone in a child’s life. Between the ages of 7 and 11, she becomes capable of operational thought – the application of logical rules to objects. At this stage, logical operations are restricted to physical objects rather than abstract ideas, which is why Piaget termed this the concrete operational stage.
  • conservation refers to the idea that something retains its identity even when its outward appearance changes. Grasping this concept is one of the most transformative changes a child undergoes as she moves into the concrete operational stage
  • conservation is foundational to another concept: reversibility. Having learned to conserve substance, he also grasps the idea that you can take a sphere, roll it into a log and then return it to its original state
  • classification – children are able to apply this more broadly at this stage.
• formal operations begins around age 12. Formal operations are not restricted to solving tangible problems. They can also be applied to abstract problems. Children now begins to treat thoughts as objects that can be manipulated by the mind.
  • hypothetical-deductible reasoning – a child doesn’t need to compare 3 cats physically to determine which is the largest
  • working with false ideas is another characteristic of this stage of development. Older children delight in formal operations that assume a hypothesis they don’t believe to be true. For Piaget, the ability to think as if something were true is precisely the kind of reasoning critical to the work of philosophers and scientists